Because a ton of the visual/olfactory/textural sensory information these pods give me the match nutritionally-dense fruit. It’s got the oleic gleam of something high-fat like an avocado, but bright carotenoid-rich coloration like a berry that wants to be eaten by red-seeing primates and birds. It tends to smell sweet and slightly floral, enhancing that effect. Similarly, when you hold it, it is quite dense (denser than water), but very soft and liquid, once again reaffirming that this “fruit” has either high sugar or high fat content and almost no cellulose to it.
As a result, within me is a less-clever monkey just screaming to eat this delicious fruit in my hand about to go into the laundry, and it does in fact take willpower to tell him he’s a stupid monkey and this is a bubble of foul-tasting poison. But every time I do laundry, this fucking limbic monstrosity rises again and assures me it’s basically like a cherry but Even Better. I have legitimately debated just biting down on one in the hopes of inducing a deterrent memory to forestall this urge in the future, but that’s what my goddamn mammal-brain wants me to fucking do and I refuse to let it win.